I'm a Mother, and I Had an Abortion

Most women who terminate pregnancies are already mothers. Three women spoke candidly about their choices.

The rhetoric around abortion rights in the U.S. often comes down to seemingly mutually exclusive choices: abortion or childbirth. The reality of women's reproductive lives is more complex. One in three American women will terminate a pregnancy in her lifetime. Of women who have abortions, 6 in 10 already have at least one child. Three in ten have two children or more.

There are not "women who have abortions" on one side and "women who are mothers" on another; those groups are often the same. As Katharine Morrison, who opened a birthing center in her abortion clinic,told Cosmopolitan.com, "I have patients who have had an abortion with me, had a baby, and had an abortion, or had a baby, had an abortion, or had a couple of abortions and had a baby, then had a couple of abortions."

Pregnancy, sex, childbirth, miscarriage, abortion, and infertility are all normal parts of women's lives. Yet abortion remains in the shadows, stigmatized and stereotyped as the province of irresponsible young women. The reality of abortion is that it remains a common medical procedure, used by women of every religion, race, class, and parenthood status. Here, three women spoke with Cosmopolitan.com about their experiences outside the standard narrative, as mothers who have also terminated pregnancies.

Shantae, 35, Oregon

When I had an abortion, I was already a mother of two: a 3-and-a-half-year-old and a 4-month-old. I had recently moved to Texas from Oregon and had just gotten a job in the records department of a hospital. I was still breastfeeding and struggling to figure out care for my children. I was in a relationship with a partner who was unemployed, and I ended up getting pregnant.

I didn't want to tell my partner. I didn't want to parent with him, and it wasn't his decision to make. I had never terminated a pregnancy before, and I never thought I would be in a situation where I would even have to consider it, so I spoke with my cousin. She went with me to Planned Parenthood. The protesters were there — they had pictures of fetuses and stuff like that. For security reasons, my cousin couldn't go into the room with me, so I was alone. I had to use the last bit of my tax return, around $425, to get the abortion because Texas Medicaid wouldn't cover it. After I terminated my pregnancy, I went home and slept.

Eventually I decided to move back to Oregon so I could be closer to my family. I went back to school and became a doula and got involved with Backline, a pregnancy options support network. Some of the women I help as a doula are either in same situation I was in or dealing with adoption or abortion issues. When it comes to maternal and women's health, abortion is just one facet of the whole picture, so I take a holistic approach. At Backline, I volunteer my time to provide peer-to-peer counseling for women, and I now sit on the board. I also work with women of color to talk about what reproductive justice looks like for us.

I terminated my pregnancy 10 years ago. Now I have two more biological children and two stepsons — a total of six kiddos.

If I hadn't had an abortion, my life would have been a lot harder. I was pretty much a single parent at that time — I had a partner, but he wasn't the father of my two children. It would have been difficult to go back to school and get a well-paying job. Having another baby while I had a 4-month-old would mean two babies in diapers, and I could barely afford diapers to begin with. With pregnancy comes maternity leave, and if you don't have any savings and you're living paycheck to paycheck like I was, you have to be dependent on social services, which is not enough to live off of.

I also wasn't in the emotional space to parent another child. I wasn't in an invested relationship with the partner I had. I would have been tied to him for the rest of my life, and looking back now, I'm really happy that I'm not. I think we make the best decisions that we can in those moments. It was a very difficult choice. But I don't regret it.

When mothers are thinking about terminating a pregnancy, it is often out of love and consideration of how your family is functioning at that moment, and trying to figure out, "Can I financially afford this baby? Can I emotionally afford another child and all the things it might bring up in my current relationship? Is it fair to the children I currently have if I'm not able to provide all the things that I would like to for them — the basics, like childcare?" I didn't have a car. I barely had a driver's license. And I was living in the South, which is not a fun place to be poor. I didn't feel like I had enough family support — they would help me to an extent, but at the end of the day, it's on you to raise your own children.

The messages we get are that women who have abortions are selfish, they just don't want to have this baby, they want to play and hang out, and when I was younger, I remember being like, "I believe in women being able to choose, but I would never do that for myself" — until it happened. Then I understood.

Gretchen, 44, Iowa

I was 18. I was a naive Iowa girl. I had learned nothing about birth control as a teenager, not because the information wasn't out there, but because I was deaf. Incidental learning, the source of so much information about how to move in the world, wasn't accessible to me.

I had a dream since I was 10 to go to Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the only liberal arts university in the world for deaf people. When I made it there, it was the first place I felt like I belonged. So here I was, hundreds of miles from home, lying in the infirmary. I had been sure I was dying, but they said it was just a urinary tract infection. Then they told me I was pregnant.

I couldn't be pregnant.

But my boyfriend was here by the side of my bed, overjoyed. "We'll get married!" he said.

How could he be so blasé about my life, my future, being ruined? I was going to school, and I was going to be a teacher or maybe a counselor. I was not ever going to have children.

We went home for Christmas, and I knew I needed to get an abortion. How did I know about abortion but not birth control? I don't know.

He enlisted my mother to his cause, and she forbade me to get an abortion. I didn't realize then that she couldn't do that.

So I didn't get an abortion. I had to drop out of Gallaudet because I was so very sick — hyperemesis, they told me.

My son was born. I wanted to put him up for adoption. Again, my mother intervened — his biological father was out of my life by then. She told me she would take him away from me and get custody of him. I couldn't do that to my child, no matter how much I felt I wasn't ready to be a mom.

That child is my eldest son. He's almost 25 now. When I came home from Gallaudet, I got back together with my high school sweetheart. He was terribly jealous of my son, and eventually I broke up with him and started dating the man who would become my first husband.

When my son was about 9 months old, I realized I was pregnant again. With my ex-boyfriend's child.

There was no way I could have another baby. Aside from my complete unsuitability as a parent and my budding relationship, my doctor had warned me I needed to wait at least a year. My son's birth had been difficult; in the end he was born by C-section, and my uterus was slow to heal.

My ex-boyfriend gave me the money. My friend took me to Iowa City. The experience was sort of surreal, maybe because I wasn't entirely sure what was going on during the procedure — this was 1990, so it was a conventional suction-based procedure. I didn't tell anyone in my family, but I told the man I was dating. He told me it was a good thing I'd done it, because he would have broken up with me if I hadn't.

We got married. He adopted my son immediately, and we had another son. We divorced after only a few years. I took my boys with me. They tell me I'm a good mama; I, like most mothers, think I was horrible at it.

I started dating a lovely man who became my second husband. He and I were together for 15 years. He's still one of my closest friends, but sometimes people just don't work. Somewhere in there, when my eldest son was 14, we took in another boy who was also 14. He was my son's best friend.

When I was just shy of 38, I moved in with a man who was six years my senior. Both of us were divorced with children. We talked about the fact that neither of us had actually wanted to be parents; there was no question of more. We had a great sex life. I knew about birth control by this time and was on Depo-Provera.

But I got pregnant.

I called Planned Parenthood immediately.

When I went in, providers at Planned Parenthood did the required exams and ultrasound. Something wasn't right. They did a transvaginal ultrasound. Something still wasn't right. They sent me to the emergency room. My partner and I had to endure hours of tests and people constantly reassuring us that the baby was fine. I finally couldn't stand it anymore and said, "I won't be continuing the pregnancy." The look on the faces of the nurse and ultrasound tech made me feel like I'd kicked a puppy.

I was cleared to go through with the abortion. This time it was much easier because the medical option was available. I took the pill and went home to wait until it was time to take the other one.

I didn't tell my children because a few weeks afterward, I was out to lunch with them and my eldest son, who was going through a militant conservative Republican phase — I'm sure in rebellion against his bleeding-heart liberal mother — stridently denounced pro-choice activists as baby killers. I just didn't want the fight at that point.

I've never regretted either abortion, though I have wondered over the years if the first had been the girl I never got. I'm very open about my life and experiences, despite not having told my children. I will someday.

Melanie, 61, Louisiana

I was entering freshman year of college in New Orleans, and unbeknownst to me I was already pregnant. This was in the fall of 1970. I just thought I was sick, but I was vomiting so much that one of my classmates — my college "big sister" — was so worried she called my parents. They took me to the emergency room, where I was diagnosed as pregnant. My mother screamed at me all the way home.

I was on a four-year scholarship to a Catholic college with a morality clause. I was going to have to withdraw.

My "big sister" at college let me know that there was an OB/GYN in a suburban parish who was performing abortions — it was an open secret. My parents took a loan out from the credit union to pay for it. My big sister brought me, because my parents couldn't make themselves do it. The doctor's name was Dr. Sidney Knight. He's dead now, but he was a hero to so many New Orleans women at a time when performing abortions was a terrible crime. He could have been put in jail or killed, but he was performing abortions compassionately, competently, and with a great deal of gentleness. His waiting room that day was filled with women of every race and age. There was a bar down the street where the men would wait to be called by the clinic to get their wife, daughter, partner, or girlfriend. He talked soothingly all during the procedure and automatically wrote a prescription for birth control. In the sweetest possible way he said words to the effect of, "I hope I never see you again."

In 1982, my son was born. He's a wonderful man, and he's getting married in the spring of 2015. I adore him. He wouldn't be in existence if I had had to live that other alternate life.

I can't imagine what my life would have been forced to be like if I had to drop out of college and give birth unwillingly. That I was able to terminate the pregnancy in a way that didn't harm my health or hinder my ability to have children later was a great gift. I am always grateful to Dr. Sidney Knight. I never pass the empty lot where his clinic once was without thinking about him.

I was raised Roman Catholic, and I always knew I wanted to be a priest. The grown-ups would make fun of me — they'd call me into a room and say, "Tell these people what you want to be when you grow up," so they could all have a laugh. They said, "You don't want to be a priest; you want to be a nun." But I knew even at 6 or 7 that I didn't want to wear the same dress for the rest of my life, so I didn't want to be a nun. I wanted to preach, and I wanted to lead worship. But there's no opportunity to do that in the Catholic Church, so I left the church in high school, and instead of a religion, I translated everything I felt about the call into social justice work. I fought for the Equal Rights Amendment in New Orleans and worked for health care access.

Then after my son was born, I found the Unitarian Church. It was the religion I had made up in my head but didn't realize actually existed in the world. Suddenly ministry was open to me — there was no bar to being a woman and being clergy, being married, or being GLBTI. Twenty-one years ago, I was ordained as a Unitarian Universalist Minister.

I have told my abortion story from the pulpit. For weeks after that worship service, I was getting lots of phone calls from women in the congregation who also wanted to share their stories of abortion, or their stories of how they were prevented from having an abortion and forced to put a baby up for adoption and mourning that loss, or stories of being forced to have a baby at an early age and how that changed everything.

There is an old expression from the early days of feminism: If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. No one questions men's autonomy. But somehow it becomes everybody's business what a woman does with her body. For me it was simple justice and equity that all women — not just rich women who could sneak to their personal doctors who would perform abortions without fanfare, not just college girls who can pass a name and a phone number around to each other, but all women — have access to all the kinds of health care they need. That must include terminating a pregnancy when that is what the woman needs and wants.

In that particular pregnancy at that particular time in the Deep South, there would have been enormous pressure to marry the father of that baby. I would have ended up living in this working-class suburban parish of New Orleans with a baby and a marginally employed husband. I almost certainly would have been a victim of domestic violence — that guy did go on to be arrested for his anger-management issues. I want to start crying just thinking about it. That woman, that other life, would have been so truncated, would have been so … I don't even know if I would be alive now.

My own mother's depression at being forced into a suburban housewife role in the Deep South led to addiction to Valium. Would I have been addicted to pills? Would I have killed myself in some way? It would have been like being in jail.

If I hadn't terminated that pregnancy, a person that the world is graced to have in it, my son, Stephen, wouldn't be alive. It's not like I could have had Stephen with the guy who got me pregnant when I was a kid. It's not like everything would be exactly like it is now except I would have had two kids. I would have had a completely different life. Whatever tiny effect I have had on people's lives in the congregations I have served in Tennessee, in New Jersey, and here at home in New Orleans post-Katrina wouldn't have happened. It would have been a different universe. It's very hard for me to even think about that.

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